7 ms·

Standardizing lessons learned from AMP

92 points by adewale 9y ago

justinph 9y ago
Lots of talk and no code or proposals, in so far as I can tell. The thing that makes the web slow isn't web standards, but too many ads and too much tracking code. If only there were a company that controlled a lot of the ads and tracking code on the web...
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  > no code or proposals What are you talking about? They linked like half a dozen concrete proposals in the post itself! Even provided a dashboard so you can easily track all of them: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/contributing/web-standards-related-to-amp.md https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/contributi...
jashkenas 9y ago
Just for kicks, folks, let's collect all of the adjectives, adverbs and qualifiers used in this post to describe ~AMP: * a leading format * consistently excellent * invest strongly in ... * well-lit * user-first * instant-loading * tightly-integrated * highly-optimized * great * well-lit * great * well documented * easily deployable * validatable * opinionated about user-first principles * fast development * constant adjustment * more important than ever before * invest strongly in ... * engaging storytelling experiences * pushing the boundaries * deep integrations * well under way * super excited * instant-loading * well-lit * great * continue to invest heavily in ... * continue to innovate on ... * incredibly excited * can't wait I'm imagining a Dilbert cartoon, where this list is a cheatsheet of things you can say about your project to get approval from your pointy-haired boss...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- blueside 9y ago
  Excellent lexical analysis :) Glad to know I wasn't the only one who couldn't help but cringe while reading this.
- mattigames 9y ago
  Text editors should have a feature to warn about a high number of qualifies/adverbs: "you are using to many qualifiers and adverbs, you may look biased to your readers, it may be a good idea to remove or rethink some of them."
  - mattferderer 9y ago
    I suggest everyone use one of many popular & excellent tools to check your professional articles for excessive & unnecessary words & long or hard to read sentences, for example here are some amazingly free tools I really enjoy: Web App: http://beta.hemingwayapp.com/ http://beta.hemingwayapp.com/ VS Code Extension: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=travisthetechie.write-good-linter https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=travisth... (This uses open source libraries you can utilize to create your own version if you don't use VS Code)
- smacktoward 9y ago
  We need an AMP version of Buzzword Bingo: http://www.businessbuzzwordbingo.com/ http://www.businessbuzzwordbingo.com/
  - jashkenas 9y ago
    Happy to provide, buddy: http://myfreebingocards.com/bingo-card-generator/results/w5zmrh http://myfreebingocards.com/bingo-card-generator/results/w5z... Bingo!
    - smacktoward 9y ago
      I applaud your well-lit, user-first attitude!
- dictum 9y ago
  This reads like a page from https://www.amazon.com/Words-that-Sell-Products-Services/dp/0071467858/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1520543207&sr=8-1&keywords=words+that+sell#reader_0071467858 https://www.amazon.com/Words-that-Sell-Products-Services/dp/...
- patmcguire 9y ago
  Most of them are silly, some of them are true. It is super integrated, it is fast, and it is opinionated. User-first is debatable, but it's not exactly publisher first and it's definitely not (external) advertiser first. No idea what well-lit means. I guess the takeaway is that the garden is great, build the walls higher?
tootie 9y ago
Is anyone out there doing anything with AMP besides Google? It seems like it could be super useful for aggregator sites like Reddit. Or HN for that matter. Like a heavyweight version of OpenGraph meta tags.
- tyingq 9y ago
  The reddit AMP pages you land on from Google searches are particularly irritating. You aren’t logged in when you go to them, and various UI expectations are broken. Web packaging could help here since it would remove the google url, allowing cookies/sessions to function again.
  - Ajedi32 9y ago
    Web Packaging (at least on its own) wouldn't help with that, since the whole point of that standard is to allow content to be prefetched from a CDN (like AMP pages currently are), and CDNs can't cache content that's user-specific. What _would_ work is serving the main content immediately, then using JS to fetch user-specific stuff after the page load.
    - tyingq 9y ago
      Right, which you can’t do now, but could do after the main page url is yours again.
    - beokop 9y ago
      ... and we’re back to optimizing for fast delivery of the page that loads your page.
  - tootie 9y ago
    I meant from the other direction. Like Reddit could pull the AMP versions of pages users link to. As for their implementation of AMP pages for Google's use, I think that's sound strategy. People landing on Reddit from Google are at the lowest level of engagement and a lot of sites serve more ads conditionally based on your level of engagement. Native visitors get a better experience, logged in contributors get the white glove treatment.
dfabulich 9y ago
I wrote a blog post about these proposals a couple of weeks ago and a nice HN thread formed around it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16424445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16424445 But as I said in my post, the problem with posts like today's AMP blog post is that they're too full of jargon to be comprehensible to a general audience. The Web Packaging standard is really cool, but today's blog post just linked out to a ton of web standards without defining them or explaining how they'll work in the future. If you've got your head deep in AMP's community, this post is quite meaningful, but to everyone else, and especially to the huge community of developers who hate AMP, it reads like Greek. It reflects a core problem with AMP's developer outreach strategy: a refusal to accept and acknowledge criticism. There are overwhelmingly more AMP detractors than AMP promoters, and the detractors have good arguments, arguments that the AMP team even kinda sorta accepts (which is why they're trying to push through these browser standards, to address the bugs). But you'll never hear AMP technical leaders like Malte Ubl or Paul Bakaus saying, "Yes, we accept that criticism, and the problems with AMP are really serious, and here's what we're doing to fix this. In the meanwhile, for many sites the tradeoff is worth it anyway." The top thread in the HN thread was not whether the AMP brand was toxic but why the AMP brand is toxic. I think that if the AMP team had somebody focused on telling AMP's story, humbly and honestly, with a focus on the web developer community on HN, Reddit, Smashing, etc. it could have really helped. Now, I think it's too late. The new Web Packaging thing shouldn't be called "AMP." The new "AMP for email" thing shouldn't be called AMP, either, because everybody knows that AMP sucks, and there's really no way to claw your way back from that.
- lern_too_spel 9y ago
  And Apple is bound to take a decade to implement the standard, so publishers will have to stick with AMP for the foreseeable future.
- wmf 9y ago
  telling AMP's story, humbly and honestly What would that look like? "We have a gun to your head"? There are some very uncomfortable truths here about Google's near-monopoly on Web traffic.
tyingq 9y ago
”we now feel ready to take the next step and work to support more instant-loading content not based on AMP technology in areas of Google Search designed for this, like the Top Stories carousel” Seems encouraging. Any step away from a walled garden is good.
falcolas 9y ago
From the point of view of a user concerned with Google's influence, this seems like a good move. From the point of view of a SRE who would have to help configure a server side implementation of web packaging, having yet another http request/response type to build and maintain seems like a bloody nightmare. And OCSP with the signature when Chrome themselves have disabled its use? It also requires custom behavior from the client, all-but-guaranteeing it won't be broadly honored. And ultimately, I'm confused about how this replaces, or supplements AMP.
- michaelmior 9y ago
  I don't believe it's intended to really replace AMP. It sounds like Google is establishing a set of performance guidelines (as many have been encouraging them to do). If you want to meet those guidelines, one way is to use AMP which I expect they'll continue to maintain and build on. If you don't like AMP for whatever reason, you can use whatever solution you want to meet the same guidelines.
  - dmitriid 9y ago
    Google has had performance guidelines for seveal years now: https://developers.google.com/speed/ https://developers.google.com/speed/ Funnily enough, Google’s own AMP fails those guidelines when not preloaded and pre-rendered from Google’s own CDN: https://ferdychristant.com/amp-the-missing-controversy-3b424031047 https://ferdychristant.com/amp-the-missing-controversy-3b424... Google will continue doing what it does: caching and preloading whatever content it prefers (select publishers, select advertisers) and penalize everyone else even if they follow all of Google’s guidelines to a T. Web Packages, no matter how well you disguise them as a web standard, will not solve that.
- reaperducer 9y ago
  > And OCSP with the signature when Chrome themselves have disabled its use? It's not the first (or probably last) time that Big G's said "Do as we say, not as we do." Heck, the blog post is hosted on WordPress instead of Google's own Blogger.
skybrian 9y ago
I'm wondering what happens if web packaging really takes off. Could mirror sites basically do what ipfs does, but without inventing a new protocol? Or do Cloudflare and other content networks already do everything website owners want?
dmitriid 9y ago
A lot if big words disguised as good intentions. There’s nothing fast, instant, or open about AMP. The latest article debunking those myths: https://ferdychristant.com/amp-the-missing-controversy-3b424031047 https://ferdychristant.com/amp-the-missing-controversy-3b424... Google’s fully opaque process around AMP for email (yes, it’s a thing): https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597 and https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13600 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13600
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  The fact that Malte is still trying to call the AMP project "well-lit" is really what throws a lot of question on this blog post. AMP is not a "well-lit" project. Why not hand AMP itself over to standards groups as well as all of the other things mentioned here? What about the proprietary GMail implementation of AMP4Email? Or the fact that none of the justifications for AMP given in this (or The Verge interview[0]) hold up as reasons for AMP4Email. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/8/17095078/google-amp-accelerated-mobile-page-announcement-standard-web-packaging-urls https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/8/17095078/google-amp-accele...
  - skybrian 9y ago
    Handing over AMP would prevent the standards committee from making backward-incompatible changes to please other participants. It seems better to start fresh and have a compatibility break? Not to mention that there's little point in preserving a name that's pretty controversial. And in the meantime, AMP would still need to be maintained. We've seen this before in less controversial areas. For example, SPDY was proprietary and HTTP/2 is a standard that entirely replaced it. I'm wary of AMP4Email as well, but the process of doing something quick and dirty and then standardizing the 2.0 version (under a different name) is pretty common.
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      Google is not replacing AMP, or promoting the standards group to replace AMP. Google is using things like web packaging with AMP, and intends to continue to do so. Their statements today, if anything, state a clear intent to continue to invest in and build on AMP. So, while all of these other components are going to be going to standards orgs, why not let them also have AMP? (A standards org is never beholden to keep an existing standard, they can always make a new one.)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
test6554 9y ago
I'm uncertain they learned the right lessons.
Animats 9y ago
Are you allowed to put Google ads and tags in an iframe yet, so they don't hold up the page load?
- wmf 9y ago
  Aren't they already async? https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/3221666?hl=en https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/3221666?hl=en
  - tatersolid 9y ago
    Async still prevents the DOMcontentloaded event from firing, and if you can’t sandbox JS into an iframe you’re screwed security-wise if the linked source gets owned or turns evil.
andrewn32 9y ago
Haven't tried this myself but came across this interesting AMP workaround: https://www.goinflow.com/amp-mobile-pagespeed-score/ https://www.goinflow.com/amp-mobile-pagespeed-score/
- wolfgang42 9y ago
  Not related to AMP but this caught my eye: > From a peak of 1.9% conversion rate at around 2 seconds This sentence and the graph it accompanies seems to imply that if your site is too fast it could reduce your conversion rate. What's going on here? Well, at the bottom of the article that graph came from: > What about all those fast pages with low conversion rates and high bounce rates? > Good question. Faster pages should retain and convert more visitors, right? In general, yes, but some of the speediest pages on a site are 404/error pages, hence the poorer business metrics. It seems like you'd want to control for this, to get statistics on bounce rates only for pages that wouldn't otherwise bounce the user anyway.
- drsim 9y ago
  No technical detail, just a lead gen page. Am I missing something?
  - vanadium 9y ago
    I'm glad I wasn't the only one wondering, "Ok, where's the technique here beyond just adding AMP markup in a conventional page?" Still not entirely convinced what's supposed to work about this method.
Ajedi32 9y ago
So, this is pretty much everything the HN crowd was asking for, right? Pull AMP apart into a bunch of web standards and switch Google search to promote any content which follows those standards rather than AMP content specifically? Why are all the top comments so negative?
- xab9 9y ago
  Probably because AMP should not have existed in the first place :) We already have everything we need to make fast and performant pages - we can't do it, because of marketing and trackers and spying and shit though: not technological factors, but human factors.
  - Ajedi32 9y ago
    And yet, AMP has succeeded at getting publishers to deliver fast and performant pages where other efforts did not. I dispute the idea that technological factors are not at play here. AMP's preloading and automatic CDN caching system have a pretty big impact on load times, and its technically-enforced restrictions on what sort of performance-impacting content publishers are allowed to include in their pages seems to do a pretty good job of ensuring pages do not become bloated.
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      The fact that Google Search is a monopoly is not a technological factor. Google gives preference to AMP sites on Google Search, therefore publishers must implement AMP. I actually have a lot less issue with AMP as a technological solution, as I do with the Google's "our way or the highway" treatment of the Internet. Google uses both it's search monopoly and it's browser monopoly (and often, both at the same time) to force the entire world to do whatever Google wants them to. Sometimes you might perceive the result to be "good", but that doesn't justify the behavior. That's why another technical implementation change blog doesn't improve anyone's mood about the whole thing: Because Malte Ubl is still pretending he's on #teamweb and not #teamgoogle.
      - 9y ago
xab9 9y ago
I wish one day marketing, print designers and useless business architects would just step back and let me build a damn page. No trackers, no spying, no fancy multilayered parallax video scrollers, no animated video carousels, no fucking ads, no taboola shit, no related clickbait articles, no tag cloud sidebar, no ooh-so-shiny bleeding edge web frameworks that has a lifecycle of a single year (megabytes of minified angular), no isomorphic shit, just a plain site with the relevant information and minimal styling.
- beokop 9y ago
  We chose to use PHP for our site redesign after using React, Elm and Jekyll in other projects. It’s really liberating. No spending days setting up a build/deploy process. Gets out of your way unless you actually need it. Everything including the kitchen sink included. Pre-installed on all Macs. Our designer can code and deploy changes by himself. I used to hate PHP. Then I tried the alternatives.
  - xab9 9y ago
    It's not the framework, it's the people (and their whoring greed mixed with dilettantism). I love vue, I'm okay with A5 and react. I usually do node stuff, but php is okay nowdays, symphony is a good thing too.
walterbell 9y ago
Repost: There's an IETF proposal for certificate-signed web content (Web Packages) which can be rendered offline. The browser address bar will no longer show the URL of the web server (e.g. Google AMP), it will show the authenticated origin of the Web Package. 2017 IETF proposal by Google: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin-webpackage-use-cases-00 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin-webpackage-use-cas... 2018 Chrome demo at AMP event: https://youtube.com/watch?&t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc https://youtube.com/watch?&t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc There may be overlap in goals with W3C Web Publications, which is working to converge EPUB and Web: https://w3c.github.io/wpub/ https://w3c.github.io/wpub/

92 points by adewale 9y ago

Lots of talk and no code or proposals, in so far as I can tell. The thing that makes the web slow isn't web standards, but too many ads and too much tracking code. If only there were a company that controlled a lot of the ads and tracking code on the web...

Ajedi32 9y ago
> no code or proposals What are you talking about? They linked like half a dozen concrete proposals in the post itself! Even provided a dashboard so you can easily track all of them: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/contributing/web-standards-related-to-amp.md https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/contributi...

jashkenas 9y ago

Just for kicks, folks, let's collect all of the adjectives, adverbs and qualifiers used in this post to describe ~AMP: * a leading format * consistently excellent * invest strongly in ... * well-lit * user-first * instant-loading * tightly-integrated * highly-optimized * great * well-lit * great * well documented * easily deployable * validatable * opinionated about user-first principles * fast development * constant adjustment * more important than ever before * invest strongly in ... * engaging storytelling experiences * pushing the boundaries * deep integrations * well under way * super excited * instant-loading * well-lit * great * continue to invest heavily in ... * continue to innovate on ... * incredibly excited * can't wait I'm imagining a Dilbert cartoon, where this list is a cheatsheet of things you can say about your project to get approval from your pointy-haired boss...

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
blueside 9y ago
Excellent lexical analysis :) Glad to know I wasn't the only one who couldn't help but cringe while reading this.
mattigames 9y ago
Text editors should have a feature to warn about a high number of qualifies/adverbs: "you are using to many qualifiers and adverbs, you may look biased to your readers, it may be a good idea to remove or rethink some of them."
- mattferderer 9y ago
  I suggest everyone use one of many popular & excellent tools to check your professional articles for excessive & unnecessary words & long or hard to read sentences, for example here are some amazingly free tools I really enjoy: Web App: http://beta.hemingwayapp.com/ http://beta.hemingwayapp.com/ VS Code Extension: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=travisthetechie.write-good-linter https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=travisth... (This uses open source libraries you can utilize to create your own version if you don't use VS Code)
smacktoward 9y ago
We need an AMP version of Buzzword Bingo: http://www.businessbuzzwordbingo.com/ http://www.businessbuzzwordbingo.com/
- jashkenas 9y ago
  Happy to provide, buddy: http://myfreebingocards.com/bingo-card-generator/results/w5zmrh http://myfreebingocards.com/bingo-card-generator/results/w5z... Bingo!
  - smacktoward 9y ago
    I applaud your well-lit, user-first attitude!
dictum 9y ago
This reads like a page from https://www.amazon.com/Words-that-Sell-Products-Services/dp/0071467858/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1520543207&sr=8-1&keywords=words+that+sell#reader_0071467858 https://www.amazon.com/Words-that-Sell-Products-Services/dp/...
patmcguire 9y ago
Most of them are silly, some of them are true. It is super integrated, it is fast, and it is opinionated. User-first is debatable, but it's not exactly publisher first and it's definitely not (external) advertiser first. No idea what well-lit means. I guess the takeaway is that the garden is great, build the walls higher?

tootie 9y ago

Is anyone out there doing anything with AMP besides Google? It seems like it could be super useful for aggregator sites like Reddit. Or HN for that matter. Like a heavyweight version of OpenGraph meta tags.

tyingq 9y ago
The reddit AMP pages you land on from Google searches are particularly irritating. You aren’t logged in when you go to them, and various UI expectations are broken. Web packaging could help here since it would remove the google url, allowing cookies/sessions to function again.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  Web Packaging (at least on its own) wouldn't help with that, since the whole point of that standard is to allow content to be prefetched from a CDN (like AMP pages currently are), and CDNs can't cache content that's user-specific. What _would_ work is serving the main content immediately, then using JS to fetch user-specific stuff after the page load.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    Right, which you can’t do now, but could do after the main page url is yours again.
  - beokop 9y ago
    ... and we’re back to optimizing for fast delivery of the page that loads your page.
- tootie 9y ago
  I meant from the other direction. Like Reddit could pull the AMP versions of pages users link to. As for their implementation of AMP pages for Google's use, I think that's sound strategy. People landing on Reddit from Google are at the lowest level of engagement and a lot of sites serve more ads conditionally based on your level of engagement. Native visitors get a better experience, logged in contributors get the white glove treatment.

dfabulich 9y ago

I wrote a blog post about these proposals a couple of weeks ago and a nice HN thread formed around it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16424445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16424445 But as I said in my post, the problem with posts like today's AMP blog post is that they're too full of jargon to be comprehensible to a general audience. The Web Packaging standard is really cool, but today's blog post just linked out to a ton of web standards without defining them or explaining how they'll work in the future. If you've got your head deep in AMP's community, this post is quite meaningful, but to everyone else, and especially to the huge community of developers who hate AMP, it reads like Greek. It reflects a core problem with AMP's developer outreach strategy: a refusal to accept and acknowledge criticism. There are overwhelmingly more AMP detractors than AMP promoters, and the detractors have good arguments, arguments that the AMP team even kinda sorta accepts (which is why they're trying to push through these browser standards, to address the bugs). But you'll never hear AMP technical leaders like Malte Ubl or Paul Bakaus saying, "Yes, we accept that criticism, and the problems with AMP are really serious, and here's what we're doing to fix this. In the meanwhile, for many sites the tradeoff is worth it anyway." The top thread in the HN thread was not whether the AMP brand was toxic but why the AMP brand is toxic. I think that if the AMP team had somebody focused on telling AMP's story, humbly and honestly, with a focus on the web developer community on HN, Reddit, Smashing, etc. it could have really helped. Now, I think it's too late. The new Web Packaging thing shouldn't be called "AMP." The new "AMP for email" thing shouldn't be called AMP, either, because everybody knows that AMP sucks, and there's really no way to claw your way back from that.

lern_too_spel 9y ago
And Apple is bound to take a decade to implement the standard, so publishers will have to stick with AMP for the foreseeable future.
wmf 9y ago
telling AMP's story, humbly and honestly What would that look like? "We have a gun to your head"? There are some very uncomfortable truths here about Google's near-monopoly on Web traffic.

tyingq 9y ago

”we now feel ready to take the next step and work to support more instant-loading content not based on AMP technology in areas of Google Search designed for this, like the Top Stories carousel” Seems encouraging. Any step away from a walled garden is good.

falcolas 9y ago

From the point of view of a user concerned with Google's influence, this seems like a good move. From the point of view of a SRE who would have to help configure a server side implementation of web packaging, having yet another http request/response type to build and maintain seems like a bloody nightmare. And OCSP with the signature when Chrome themselves have disabled its use? It also requires custom behavior from the client, all-but-guaranteeing it won't be broadly honored. And ultimately, I'm confused about how this replaces, or supplements AMP.

michaelmior 9y ago
I don't believe it's intended to really replace AMP. It sounds like Google is establishing a set of performance guidelines (as many have been encouraging them to do). If you want to meet those guidelines, one way is to use AMP which I expect they'll continue to maintain and build on. If you don't like AMP for whatever reason, you can use whatever solution you want to meet the same guidelines.
- dmitriid 9y ago
  Google has had performance guidelines for seveal years now: https://developers.google.com/speed/ https://developers.google.com/speed/ Funnily enough, Google’s own AMP fails those guidelines when not preloaded and pre-rendered from Google’s own CDN: https://ferdychristant.com/amp-the-missing-controversy-3b424031047 https://ferdychristant.com/amp-the-missing-controversy-3b424... Google will continue doing what it does: caching and preloading whatever content it prefers (select publishers, select advertisers) and penalize everyone else even if they follow all of Google’s guidelines to a T. Web Packages, no matter how well you disguise them as a web standard, will not solve that.
reaperducer 9y ago
> And OCSP with the signature when Chrome themselves have disabled its use? It's not the first (or probably last) time that Big G's said "Do as we say, not as we do." Heck, the blog post is hosted on WordPress instead of Google's own Blogger.

skybrian 9y ago

I'm wondering what happens if web packaging really takes off. Could mirror sites basically do what ipfs does, but without inventing a new protocol? Or do Cloudflare and other content networks already do everything website owners want?

dmitriid 9y ago

A lot if big words disguised as good intentions. There’s nothing fast, instant, or open about AMP. The latest article debunking those myths: https://ferdychristant.com/amp-the-missing-controversy-3b424031047 https://ferdychristant.com/amp-the-missing-controversy-3b424... Google’s fully opaque process around AMP for email (yes, it’s a thing): https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597 and https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13600 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13600

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
The fact that Malte is still trying to call the AMP project "well-lit" is really what throws a lot of question on this blog post. AMP is not a "well-lit" project. Why not hand AMP itself over to standards groups as well as all of the other things mentioned here? What about the proprietary GMail implementation of AMP4Email? Or the fact that none of the justifications for AMP given in this (or The Verge interview[0]) hold up as reasons for AMP4Email. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/8/17095078/google-amp-accelerated-mobile-page-announcement-standard-web-packaging-urls https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/8/17095078/google-amp-accele...
- skybrian 9y ago
  Handing over AMP would prevent the standards committee from making backward-incompatible changes to please other participants. It seems better to start fresh and have a compatibility break? Not to mention that there's little point in preserving a name that's pretty controversial. And in the meantime, AMP would still need to be maintained. We've seen this before in less controversial areas. For example, SPDY was proprietary and HTTP/2 is a standard that entirely replaced it. I'm wary of AMP4Email as well, but the process of doing something quick and dirty and then standardizing the 2.0 version (under a different name) is pretty common.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Google is not replacing AMP, or promoting the standards group to replace AMP. Google is using things like web packaging with AMP, and intends to continue to do so. Their statements today, if anything, state a clear intent to continue to invest in and build on AMP. So, while all of these other components are going to be going to standards orgs, why not let them also have AMP? (A standards org is never beholden to keep an existing standard, they can always make a new one.)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

test6554 9y ago

I'm uncertain they learned the right lessons.

Animats 9y ago

Are you allowed to put Google ads and tags in an iframe yet, so they don't hold up the page load?

wmf 9y ago
Aren't they already async? https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/3221666?hl=en https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/3221666?hl=en
- tatersolid 9y ago
  Async still prevents the DOMcontentloaded event from firing, and if you can’t sandbox JS into an iframe you’re screwed security-wise if the linked source gets owned or turns evil.

andrewn32 9y ago

Haven't tried this myself but came across this interesting AMP workaround: https://www.goinflow.com/amp-mobile-pagespeed-score/ https://www.goinflow.com/amp-mobile-pagespeed-score/

wolfgang42 9y ago
Not related to AMP but this caught my eye: > From a peak of 1.9% conversion rate at around 2 seconds This sentence and the graph it accompanies seems to imply that if your site is too fast it could reduce your conversion rate. What's going on here? Well, at the bottom of the article that graph came from: > What about all those fast pages with low conversion rates and high bounce rates? > Good question. Faster pages should retain and convert more visitors, right? In general, yes, but some of the speediest pages on a site are 404/error pages, hence the poorer business metrics. It seems like you'd want to control for this, to get statistics on bounce rates only for pages that wouldn't otherwise bounce the user anyway.
drsim 9y ago
No technical detail, just a lead gen page. Am I missing something?
- vanadium 9y ago
  I'm glad I wasn't the only one wondering, "Ok, where's the technique here beyond just adding AMP markup in a conventional page?" Still not entirely convinced what's supposed to work about this method.

Ajedi32 9y ago

So, this is pretty much everything the HN crowd was asking for, right? Pull AMP apart into a bunch of web standards and switch Google search to promote any content which follows those standards rather than AMP content specifically? Why are all the top comments so negative?

xab9 9y ago
Probably because AMP should not have existed in the first place :) We already have everything we need to make fast and performant pages - we can't do it, because of marketing and trackers and spying and shit though: not technological factors, but human factors.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  And yet, AMP has succeeded at getting publishers to deliver fast and performant pages where other efforts did not. I dispute the idea that technological factors are not at play here. AMP's preloading and automatic CDN caching system have a pretty big impact on load times, and its technically-enforced restrictions on what sort of performance-impacting content publishers are allowed to include in their pages seems to do a pretty good job of ensuring pages do not become bloated.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    The fact that Google Search is a monopoly is not a technological factor. Google gives preference to AMP sites on Google Search, therefore publishers must implement AMP. I actually have a lot less issue with AMP as a technological solution, as I do with the Google's "our way or the highway" treatment of the Internet. Google uses both it's search monopoly and it's browser monopoly (and often, both at the same time) to force the entire world to do whatever Google wants them to. Sometimes you might perceive the result to be "good", but that doesn't justify the behavior. That's why another technical implementation change blog doesn't improve anyone's mood about the whole thing: Because Malte Ubl is still pretending he's on #teamweb and not #teamgoogle.
    - 9y ago

xab9 9y ago

I wish one day marketing, print designers and useless business architects would just step back and let me build a damn page. No trackers, no spying, no fancy multilayered parallax video scrollers, no animated video carousels, no fucking ads, no taboola shit, no related clickbait articles, no tag cloud sidebar, no ooh-so-shiny bleeding edge web frameworks that has a lifecycle of a single year (megabytes of minified angular), no isomorphic shit, just a plain site with the relevant information and minimal styling.

beokop 9y ago
We chose to use PHP for our site redesign after using React, Elm and Jekyll in other projects. It’s really liberating. No spending days setting up a build/deploy process. Gets out of your way unless you actually need it. Everything including the kitchen sink included. Pre-installed on all Macs. Our designer can code and deploy changes by himself. I used to hate PHP. Then I tried the alternatives.
- xab9 9y ago
  It's not the framework, it's the people (and their whoring greed mixed with dilettantism). I love vue, I'm okay with A5 and react. I usually do node stuff, but php is okay nowdays, symphony is a good thing too.

walterbell 9y ago

Repost: There's an IETF proposal for certificate-signed web content (Web Packages) which can be rendered offline. The browser address bar will no longer show the URL of the web server (e.g. Google AMP), it will show the authenticated origin of the Web Package. 2017 IETF proposal by Google: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin-webpackage-use-cases-00 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin-webpackage-use-cas... 2018 Chrome demo at AMP event: https://youtube.com/watch?&t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc https://youtube.com/watch?&t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc There may be overlap in goals with W3C Web Publications, which is working to converge EPUB and Web: https://w3c.github.io/wpub/ https://w3c.github.io/wpub/